There’s Really Slow, and Then There’s MAGA Ultra-Slow

If there’s one thing we have learned about MAGA politics, it’s just that MAGA elected and appointed officials have a minimal ability to govern pragmatically. The “no compromise” MAGA-controlled House of Representatives has managed to reduce the legislative flow through Congress by 90% when compared to pre-MAGA congressional sessions. They’re willing to stop government, antagonize elderly citizens reliant on Social Security and Medicare, defund popular programs like the recent Biden administration inflation reduction and infrastructure acts (yet take credit for the very bills they voted against when funded projects show up in their districts), actually oppose most Biden in initiatives even if they once sponsored them, and launch dead-end impeachment and investigative efforts based on conspiracy theories that generally go nowhere.

They will vote for legislation that imposes rightwing religious dogma in their culture wars. They favor letting business roll without regulation, love to cut taxes for the rich while cutting programs for everyone else, and even when they pass bills they like – such as defense spending – they have been known to hold up military promotions to attempt force their cultural prerogatives on our soldiers. They can co-sponsor desperately needed immigration reform, and then pull back supporting their own bill when so ordered by their cult-master, Donald Trump. Not to mention that “speaker ousting” is an increasingly popular MAGA sport.

MAGA-controlled state legislatures, particularly with MAGA governors, love to pass laws aimed at severely restricting women and minorities, exposing doctors to incarceration for life without the possibility of parole for performing the same medical procedures they had practiced without that risk for decades. They pass profoundly inane censorship, class lesson bills, and gender restrictions – changing practices that have gone on for centuries without alteration – and spend tens if not hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars in unsuccessful legal battles to support their useless and even dangerous legislation. Climate change does not move their legislative needle, even as flooding, coastal erosion and severe tornados and hurricanes impact their states more than blue ones.

Ah, but then there are their judicial appointments, which despite efforts to limit “we know this judge will rule strictly along MAGA lines” forum shopping, continue to elevate the Bible above the Constitution. Despite the early March federal judiciary rule to discourage so-called “judge shopping” nationwide by making sure high-profile lawsuits seeking to overturn statewide or national policies are randomly assigned among a larger pool of judges, several Trump-appointed district courts have refused to accept this limitation. We have clearly politically biased federal judges, Trump appointments like Aileen Cannon in Florida and Matthew Kacsmaryk in Texas, who are willing to risk censure and reversal to deliver a MAGA-approved decision, no matter how thin any judicial precedent may be in support (if any).

And if you think this effort to slow justice to a crawl, pushing MAGA doctrine whenever possible, does not apply to the US Supreme Court, by now you should know better. Firearms are now profoundly less regulated, minorities more vulnerable and facing reduced voting rights and the “right to life, but we support guns and the death penalty” crowd is pushing to pass state limitations on abortion under the high court’s reversal of a basic right to an abortion in Dodd vs Jackson.

It is equally clear that there is profound dissention within the ranks of the Supreme Court justices. Happy gift recipients like Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and mega-recipient Clarence Thomas… often with the “culture vs Constitution” remaining conservatives – John Roberts (CJ), Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh in tow – are clearly facing a very unhappy trio of liberals – Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson – who are forced to witness the undoing of decades of precedents.

Aside from this “great undoing,” the hamstrung court is also operating at a snail’s pace as it faces decisions that it is likely to make that will, as many the decisions of the Trump court have been, wildly unpopular with the majority of Americans. The April 6th CNN News (John Fritze) addresses this judicial pace: “But as the high court moves toward a busy and fraught final sitting this term, it is also once again slipping behind its past pace, issuing fewer opinions than it did at this same point in its nine-month work period just a few years ago. The court has handed down 11 opinions so far this term – most in relatively obscure matters that were decided unanimously.

“The Supreme Court has issued opinions in just 22% of its argued cases this year, compared with 34% through mid-April two years ago and 46% in 2021, according to data compiled by Adam Feldman, founder of Empirical SCOTUS. The share of resolved cases is up slightly over last year – a historic low… Taken together, the numbers point to a term in which the court’s decisions could be scrunched into a shorter time fame – potentially giving the court’s 6-3 conservative supermajority an opportunity to reshape the political debate around culture war issues just as Americans begin tuning into the Biden-Trump rematch for president.

“Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California Berkeley School of Law, said it had become a ‘clear trend’ in recent years that the court is ‘very slow’ releasing decisions. Though there are many theories about why that may be, the court’s opaque-by-design practice of negotiation and opinion crafting makes it difficult to say with certainty… A large share of the court’s docket touches on ‘enormously significant and difficult issues,’ Chemerinsky told CNN. ‘It also is a court that has deep divisions. I assume that all of this leads to delays in releasing decisions.’…

“The slower pace could prove particularly meaningful this year because of Trump’s assertion of immunity from special counsel Jack Smith’s election subversion charges. Trump asked the justices to block a lower court ruling that flatly rejected those immunity claims. The high court agreed to hear the case in late February but did not set arguments until the end of this month.

“The case has put the Supreme Court on the clock and opened it up to criticism that delay will play into Trump’s broader legal strategy of pushing off his pending criminal trials until after the November election. Unless the court speeds up its work, it’s difficult to see how the Trump immunity decision would arrive before the end of June.” If this MAGA majority is troublesome and slow now – ignoring the maximum that “justice delayed is justice denied” – just think what a flood of additional MAGA populist judicial appointments, culled from the Heritage Foundation’s list of “right thinking” candidates, would be like if Trump were to win in November. Trump doesn’t like limitations of the Constitution much anyway.

I’m Peter Dekom, and except for the most zealous extremists, most Americans truly do not understand that commanding the military and appointing federal judges are the most important powers a president has… particularly one who scoffs at the purported obligation to “preserve and protect” the Constitution.